Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Further Realities. There was some touch of ecstasy in this day, for Mirandolina Conway, too. Even the name which had been given her in the satirical spirit of Bally- cullen, seemed more in harmony with romance. . . There was a great gladness upon her when she heard it spoken. In moments during the long day behind the counter, her eyes were dazzled by happy, glinting lights, which had begun for the first time to flash, queerly almost, out of the gloom of Ballycullen. There did not appear to be the least vanity in the thought that Sara Curran could not have loved Robert Emmet more fondly than she now loved Michael Dempsey. She is far from the land where her young- hero sleeps, And lovers around her are sighing ; But coldly she turns from their gaze and weeps, For her heart in his grave is lying. That was from the song that had been made by Tommy Moore. Even as she remembered the familiar lines, they seemed to hold less sincerity than she would wish them to contain, for had not the proud and lovely Miss Curran a little later married an English officer! Imagine, an English officer, one of the very lot that butchered RobertEmmet, and had not the poet Moore, who had written those lines, taken up a Government job! Michael had told her these and many other intimate little scraps of Irish history in the intervals between the acts last night. She had not known of such things, for what was she after all only a silly girl in a shop reading only the silly books that one could get in a place like Ballycullen ? But now, through power of all that was hidden in the heart and in the mind of Michael Dempsey, was her thought and hope being rapidly linked with beautiful and noble things. He was so very different in his way from anyone she knew in Ballycullen. Her mind was...